Getting Social

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “How does Azzip use different social media platforms?” you’re probably either in marketing or working on a class project. Even if you aren’t, here’s a quick peek behind the curtain:

Primarily, we use Twitter, Instagram, and as my grandma calls it, “the Facebook.”

“The Facebook” is where we have the largest following and where we get a ton of interaction. We love hearing feedback from all our fans, especially when you’re excited for our new Pizza of the Month or have stories about great customer service you experienced in the store. It’s always nice seeing people tag their friends on posts to let them know what Azzip has been up to and to plan their lunch and dinner. As our main social media manager, it’s been so cool seeing our online community grow from a couple thousand to over 20,000 on Facebook. I can’t say I’ve met every single one of you, but once you start interacting with our posts, I start recognizing you pretty quickly!

It was about 6 months after Azzip West opened that we started focusing more on Facebook. Early on, we weren’t 100% sure about what we were doing. We would add $10 to a picture or video here and there, get a few thousand views, and call it a day. Compare that to today where we still aren’t 100% sure what we’re doing but have learned a lot along the way!

Over the past year, we’ve continued to refine our style and have learned more about what you want to see. It’s a team effort and we’re becoming more aware of which posts truly feel like Azzip. One of my favorites we’ve done was for something fairly simple – a menu addition. This ingredient was something a ton of people wanted and even a picture of it would have done well enough. Instead of just a picture, we had a photo shoot. I’m talking about our banana pepper post:

For many people, especially around my age and up, Facebook is filled with engagement pictures, weddings, and babies. We thought this was a clever way to mix in with that while having people do a second take. On to Instagram!

Instagram (@azzip_pizza) is great for instant feedback. It’s becoming the platform of choice for many of our fans and it’s not hard to see why. Feeds are more curated, clutter is reduced, and you don’t have to scroll past a dozen quizzes trying to find out which Disney song describes you (I hope it’s Ducktales. A-woo-hoo!). Some users keep a certain aesthetic for their posts – a single color or palette, only top-down shots of food, close-ups, etc. We don’t do that. The look of our feed is always evolving. With a new pizza rotating in each month, we like to let the personality of that pizza shine. Overall, our Instagram is a nice mix of our visual best from Facebook and select choices from Twitter.

Which brings us to that. Twitter. We love Twitter (@AzzipTweets). It’s awesome for customer service and sharing dank memes. If you don’t know what those are, ask your kids. Anytime I tell people what my job is, it’s normally our Twitter that gets the most compliments.

There’s a quote from E.B. White that goes, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.” Essentially, Twitter is a frog. (There are a lot of frogs on Twitter 🐸☕️)

Here’s the guts: It’s still the best platform for current events. It’s a giant group chat on a global scale. We can join topics on the national level or see what’s going on locally. Part of our role is to put out information about our new pizzas, company news, and to provide customer service whether it’s following up on a good experience or resolving a bad one. The other part is what gets more attention.

It’s very easy for a brand to get into content marketing and #hashtagging #every #word #they #tweet. Alternatively, brands stray into “fellow kids” territory when they use a trend/meme incorrectly or it’s outdated. You might see pictures like this on brands that are trying to stay #relevant:

Objectively, it’s terrible. Subjectively, it’s still pretty bad but could possibly be used ironically.

We don’t try to jump on each day’s new meme. Not all of them apply to us. We want to make sure the ones we use aren’t past their prime but can be recognized by a lot of our followers. These are three tweets that used the right meme or phrase, at the right time, in the right way:

Overall, our hopes for Twitter are to be funny and connecting with people where they are.

Speaking of where they are, we’ve gotten into Snapchat. While our budget isn’t big enough to make a selfie lens that transforms your face into a pizza, we have been experimenting with geofilters. These are filters that appear in a particular area. We’ve found that simple filters with minimal branding that are useful to who we’re targeting perform the best. So far it’s been a little bit art and a little bit science on which ones perform the best. Our top one so far was one made for IU’s Block Party. It ended up getting 128,000 views! The second is a variation of what we’ve placed at some high school football games. It’s simple, feels like football, and both teams can use it.

Overall, we’re still learning what works and finding creative ways to get our name out there. We get a ton of great feedback online and love hearing from you! If you have any questions or ideas for us, let us know! You can tweet us, Facebook us, or send a message to zack.mathis@azzippizza.com.